So you use InnoDB, have indexes on your table, think of row level locking and concurrent queries, feel good and go to sleep. All this while forgetting that even UPDATE and SELECT .... FOR UPDATE statements will (or may) also use the same index for scanning or updating. Then what? You may ask.
Well, InnoDB row level locking works in a somewhat different manner when using indexes. In this case, InnoDB locks index records in shared or exclusive mode when searching or scanning an index. Therefore, as mentioned in MySQL Documentation, the row level locks are actually index record locks.
To complicate matters (or resolve issues) further, the lock is a gap lock. A gap lock refers to a lock that only locks a gap before some index record.
As per the example in …
[Read more]